Dabo Swinney and Clemson find positives after a bye. Bill Belichick and UNC find more of the same

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Dabo Swinney and Clemson find positives after a bye. Bill Belichick and UNC find more of the same

2025-10-05 07:44 Last Updated At：08:00

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — Dabo Swinney watched his Clemson team start Saturday with a trick play that went for a 75-yard touchdown and never look back.

North Carolina ended its Saturday with Bill Belchick calling a timeout with 1 second left, extending the game to coach a team long since beaten in a home stadium largely emptied by halftime.

The Atlantic Coast Conference's marquee coaching names — Clemson's Swinney with two national championships, UNC's Belichick with six Super Bowl titles in the NFL — each entered this game hoping for positive signs after an open date that followed a bumpy September. They exited with very different vibes: Swinney getting confirmation on previous hope in a 38-10 win, Belichick losing in lopsided fashion for the third time in as many games against a power-conference program.

“I’ll keep my conversations with the team between myself and the team,” Belchick said, his voice low and answers terse. “But I'll just say we’re going to work through it, and work our way out of it. We'll get better every week and keep working every week and prepare for the next team, be ready to go. That's what we’re going to do.”

Belichick's arrival in Chapel Hill and Swinney's stature as one of the biggest names in college football certainly made this game stand out on the schedule in the offseason. But the game had lost luster, between the Tigers — ranked No. 4 in the preseason AP Top 25 as ACC favorite — going 1-3 for the worst start in Swinney's long tenure and the Tar Heels struggling so badly to start Belichick's tenure.

It marked only the second time in college football history that a coach with multiple national championships faced one with multiple Super Bowl titles.

This one was decided in the first 15 minutes, with Clemson scoring 28 points and averaging 15.8 yards per play in the opening quarter. Cade Klubnik had four TD passes by halftime — two each to Adam Randall and Christian Bentancur — in a game so under control that Swinney told Klubnik he planned to pull him for reserve Christopher Vizzina on the second drive of the third quarter.

Afterward, Swinney was ebullient, from the way the team practiced through the week to Klubnik's play (22 of 24 passing for 254 yards) and the defensive effort with coordinator Tom Allen opting to work the sideline instead of being in the coaches' box in previous games.

“We've got to try to find a way to build momentum, to develop some confidence from this, because we have not played with a lot of confidence,” Swinney said. "We have not played with a lot of precision. And you saw us make plays today that we just haven’t been making.”

Clemson had lost one-possession games to ranked LSU and Georgia Tech teams, as well as losing at home to Syracuse.

“I would just say that we finally we played complementary football, and what we were capable of doing,” cornerback Ashton Hampton said. “That's just something we were trying to do the first four or five weeks and just haven't been able to get it done.”

Then there's the Tar Heels, who found merely more of the same.

The 73-year-old Belichick started his UNC tenure with a 48-14 loss on Labor Day to TCU, with every ugly moment preserved in a national spotlight. Wins followed against Charlotte of the American Athletic Conference and Championship Subdivision opponent Richmond, but their second matchup against a Big 12 team — this time, UCF — was another blowout loss.

This time, a perfect-weather day that included buzz from a concert by rapper Ludacris on a nearby campus quad gave way to the home fans fleeing in droves by halftime with the Tigers up 35-3 — a repeat of the opening-night exodus against TCU, though a quarter earlier.

That led to a humbling repeat of the game being played out in a largely empty stadium, with the Tar Heels managing a fourth-quarter TD with the outcome long decided. Now UNC has a touchdown on 4 of 29 drives (13.8%) against power-conference opponents, not counting drives stopped by halftime or game’s end.

That's not exactly in line with the school paying Belichick at least $10 million guaranteed for three seasons as part of an upgraded football investment.

And Belichick didn't sound on the verge of making major changes, including when asked about coaching duties or play-calling responsibilities.

No, the plan is more of the same heading into another open week before visiting California on Oct. 17.

“The main thing we need to do is keep doing what we’re doing and do it better,” Belichick said. “I don’t think fundamentally we’re doing the wrong things. We’re just not doing it well enough.”

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Why a centuries-old Mexica myth became Mexico’s enduring symbol

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The almighty eagle perched on a cactus while devouring a serpent on Mexico’s flag hints at the myth behind the foundation of the country’s capital.

It's a divine sign in an ancient legend, according to which the god Huitzilopochtli asked a group called the Mexica — who founded what was later known as the Aztec Empire — to leave their homeland in search of a place to establish a new city.

It took some 175 years before they spotted the sacred omen and established the city of Tenochtitlan in 1325 where Mexico City stands today.

How the eagle, the cactus and the serpent became an emblem and endured through the European conquest is the focus of a new exhibition. “A coat of arms, an emblem, a symbol of identity,” runs through Dec. 15 at the Old City Hall in downtown Mexico City.

The exhibit is among the government’s activities marking the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Mexica capital.

“Recognizing Tenochtitlan doesn’t mean recalling a dead past, but rather the living heartbeat that still beats beneath our city,” President Claudia Sheinbaum said during an official ceremony in July. “It was the center of an Indigenous world that built its own model of civilization — one in harmony with the Earth, the stars, and its gods and goddesses.”

Fragments of that civilization lie underneath the Old City Hall, the current seat of Mexico City’s government.

Built by order of Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés in 1522, its construction used stones from ancient Mexica sacred sites. The building has been renewed over time, but its halls have witnessed centuries of governance and symbolism.

“Holding the exhibition in this City Hall, a place of decisions and memory, is a way to recognize the history of those who once inhabited it and how its transformations still echo in Mexico City’s identity,” said Mariana Gómez Godoy, Director of Mexico City’s Cultural Heritage, during the exhibit’s inauguration in November.

The Mexica themselves recorded their story after Tenochtitlan fell to the Europeans. Several codices depict the path that led them to fulfill their deity’s task.

Eduardo Matos Moctezuma — an acclaimed archaeologist from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History — has argued that the legend is a symbolic retelling of historical events, rather than a literal claim about divine prophecy.

Still, according to the Templo Mayor Museum, the region's pre-Hispanic people preserved the origin story of a long journey that led to the founding of Tenochtitlan as a cornerstone of their traditions.

They honored a small island in Lake Texcoco, now central Mexico City, as the place where the Mexica found the eagle foretold by Huitzilopochtli.

The new exhibit offers a historical overview of how the image evolved — from its establishment as the city’s coat of arms in 1523 under Emperor Charles V to its transformation into an emblem of Mexico as an independent nation.

Curated by researcher Guadalupe Lozada, it also displays images portraying how it was adopted by the religious orders in charge of converting the Indigenous people to Catholicism.

While the eagle and cactus were already adopted by Europeans in the mid-16th century, the Jesuits introduced the serpent decades later. “From then on, it would remain a symbol of the city’s identity — one that would also spread throughout the rest of New Spain,” Lozada said.

According to her, plenty of monasteries dating back to the 17th century attest to how friars displayed the eagle and cactus in their sanctuaries. Even today, the emblem can still be seen above the façade of Mexico City’s cathedral and inside one of its chapels.

“Such was the strength of Mexica culture that the evangelizers sought to adopt it rather than exclude it,” she said. “It was like saying, ‘I acknowledge your history.’”

The same logic applied with the European conquerors. Even as they ordered the destruction of the Mexica religious complexes, the representation of the foundational myth was not erased from history.

“For them, conquering a city like Tenochtitlan was a matter of pride and therefore they never intended to deny its existence,” Lozada said. “This meant that the strength of the city buried beneath the new one underlies it and resurfaces — as if it had never disappeared.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.